Case Study: RS Components achieves rapid, cost-effective translation of 30 million product descriptions into 12 languages with RWS

RS Components grows online catalogue by reducing translation times to one day

RS Components, the e‑commerce arm of Electrocomponents PLC, sells over 600,000 products across 32 countries to more than one million customers. Faced with rapidly growing product content but a limited translation budget, the company needed full product listings in 12 core languages yet could not scale human translation, resulting in inconsistent local sites and slow publishing.

Working with SDL (now part of RWS), RS Components deployed Translation Management and SDL Machine Translation Cloud (Language Weaver), integrated with its CMS and translation memories to deliver 30 million words in 12 languages within six months using trained neural engines and daily automated workflows. The solution cut publishing time from 5–10 days to 1–2 days, noticeably reduced costs, shifted the team from manual to automated translation, and enabled rapid catalog expansion.

RS Components

Dominic Pemberton

Vice President of Digital Content